Meta accused of snarfing people's Snapchat data via traffic decryption
I ain't afraid of no ghosts, but in this case...
Personal Tech
27 Mar 2024 | 20
Shaky grounds
I'm all for sticking it to Facebook, but what is supposedly stolen? A rack/row layout design? Is that even something that you could license? "going back as far as 2011" I was working in some data centers with "modular designs" and we just called it "striping." This was going on at Cisco, and NetApp, probably anywhere where anyone else could have thought of the same thing. How similar is this to scripting, or cubicle design? I see little commercial value in my scripts, yet I get paid to provide them and some support to back it up for a time, but the script in itself is not a special, secret, or readily valuable thing that couldn't be monetized in any other setting. Plus I can reuse them at different sites, and not have to bother with any disclosure agreements, as no inside business secrets have changed hands. Just some simple methods and functions to move text, or automate widgets, or other glue-type tools. Our how I stack a rack, or feed a cable. This is just common knowledge stuff for the industry. Only an idiot would think a simple script is a licensable chunk of code, or a rack-stack-method. And by extension; data center design. How about I sue everyone who ever used my data center design methodology where I just throw devices still in their cartons into a room, then wire them up where they lie? Someone could have done this. Surely I should protect my "special knowledge" of Random Data Center Design℠? I think this is spirit to which the Open Compute Project was formed, and realistically the most valuable piece is the hardware design, and least of which would be rack/row layouts, yet there is some method to that madness, and engineers following the project spec can use these as a base for their own customization.
I think this boils down to a rack and stack company getting angry because a child could do the same thing; design the layout of some racks in a data center. The only difference in the two designs will be that one is submitted in Crayon. These guys should pick up their drills, mount some racks and floor tiles and stop pretending they have IP of any value than to complete morons and other government agencies will still pay for "designs" everyone else in the industry manages to figure out over a lunchtime. It is known.
I guarantee you all we could cobble together a fancy shipping container, stick it on a barge and cast off [sic] the plans as an Open Floating Compute Platform and no one would say boo. Unless we have some billions of dollars in our coffers.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
